Attendance Is Up. Employee Engagement Is Down.

Gallup's annual State of the Global Workplace report, released in April 2025, found that only 21 percent of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2024, down from 23 percent a year earlier. Engagement among managers fell further, from 30 percent to 27 percent, according to a summary of the report by the HR publication Unleash. The decline came in a year when many large employers were tightening office attendance rules.

The two trends are not necessarily linked, and Gallup's figures cover workers of every kind, including many who have never worked remotely. But together they undercut a common assumption in management: that bringing people back to their desks will, by itself, restore commitment. Attendance can be required. Engagement, the degree to which people are invested in their work and in their employer's goals, cannot.

A measurement problem

Much of the push for attendance stems from a measurement problem. Managers who used to judge effort by watching it now have to judge results. In a 2022 survey of about 20,000 people across 11 countries, Microsoft found that 87 percent of employees considered themselves productive, while 85 percent of leaders said hybrid work made it difficult to be confident that their staff were productive. Microsoft described the gap as "productivity paranoia."

Presence is an imperfect proxy. An employee at a desk may be fully occupied, or may be sitting through meetings that produce little. Figures cited by Atlassian put the time the average employee spends in unproductive meetings at 31 hours a month, close to four working days. Requiring more attendance does nothing to reduce that figure, and in-person schedules often fill with additional meetings.

What the evidence says about flexibility

The case for trust-based arrangements rests on a body of research that has grown since the pandemic. A widely cited Stanford study, summarized by Apollo Technical, found that working from home raised productivity by 13 percent. A later randomized experiment led by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom at the travel company Trip.com, published in Nature in June 2024, found that letting about 1,600 employees work from home two days a week reduced resignations among non-managers by a third, with no measurable effect on performance or promotions.

The cost of withdrawing that flexibility is visible in the other direction. A University of Pittsburgh study of 54 S&P 500 companies that introduced return-to-office mandates between 2020 and 2023 found that employee turnover rose by 14 percent on average afterward, according to Fortune. Senior managers and employees with more skills listed on LinkedIn were among the most likely to leave, and vacancies took longer to fill.

Engagement in Europe

The engagement problem is especially pronounced in Europe. Gallup found that 73 percent of European employees were not engaged and 15 percent were actively disengaged, and the region's engagement rate has hovered around 12 to 13 percent since 2016, according to the Unleash summary. Those figures long predate the recent wave of attendance rules, which suggests that weak engagement in the region has deeper causes than where people sit.

Several European countries have legislated around flexibility and rest rather than presence. Spain's Organic Law 3/2018 gives workers a right to digital disconnection outside working hours and requires employers to adopt internal policies on it. Portugal approved legislation in November 2021 that bars employers with more than 10 staff from contacting employees outside working hours, except in emergencies, and requires them to contribute to remote workers' energy and internet costs, according to the consultancy Mercer.

What trust looks like in practice

Trust-based management is not the absence of management. It typically involves clear objectives, regular check-ins focused on outcomes and discretion for teams over where and when routine work gets done. Office days, where they exist, are reserved for work that benefits from them, such as onboarding, planning and problem-solving that needs people in the same room.

Measuring outcomes requires more effort than counting attendance. Managers have to define what good work looks like for each role, agree deadlines and review results, rather than relying on the visible signal of a full desk. The payoff is information that reflects actual performance. An employee who delivers consistently from home shows up in the results, and so does one who is present every day but contributes little. Attendance records cannot make that distinction, which is one reason the research finds so little benefit from mandates alone.

Trust also means accepting that some employees will do their best work somewhere other than headquarters, whether at home or in another city for a few months. That shift has expanded the market for furnished housing rented by the month, often to professionals who keep their jobs while relocating temporarily. RentRemote lists furnished monthly rentals in cities including Madrid and Lisbon, set up for people who work from home.